Smith College's Moodle

What is language? What does it mean for words to have meaning? What is the meaning of words? These are the fundamentalquestions in the philosophy of language. We start with the question: what kind of meaning do linguistic expressions have? Do thesigns we use to communicate concern thoughts we want to express, as seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke thought? Ordo the words we use to communicate concern things in the world, as philosophers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suchas John Mill, Gottlieb Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Saul Kripke maintain? We look at what kinds of meaning specific linguisticexpressions have, such as names and definite descriptions, e.g., “The King of France.” We examine syntax questions: how themeaning of sentences depends on the meaning of their parts.

Second, we turn to the question of linguistic meaning in general. We look at the conception of language and meaning proposed byW.V. O. Quine and developed by Donald Davidson.

We examine Quine and Davidson’s views on what it is to make sense of language. We also look at Quine’s famous attack on theanalytic-synthetic distinction—the issue of whether statements are true or false by meaning alone, e.g., “All bachelors areunmarried,” or in virtue of experience, e.g., “It is raining now.”

The third issue we try to understand more profoundly is the role of language in our lives. We look at J. L. Austin’s speech act theory,according to which the fundamental thing we must understand about any language is how a speaker uses it. Then, we look at H.P.Grice’s attempt to explain what speakers mean by the expressions they use to communicate.

 The fourth issue we discuss is the evolution of language. Did language evolve from the primate brain? Do non-human animals havea system of communication we could call language?

The fifth issue we discuss is metaphor. What are metaphors? How do we use metaphors to understand our lives?

 The sixth issue we discuss concerns the effect of our words on others. We examine the nature of slurs, racial epithets, and silencing speech, among other topics.